


Benevolence to Lies

by NorroenDyrd



Series: Should Never Have Existed [11]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Chantry Bashing, Dialogue Heavy, Dorks in Love, F/M, Falling In Love, Flashbacks, Helpful Cole (Dragon Age), Hugs, Long Lost/Secret Relatives, Non-Canon Inquisitor (Dragon Age), POV Cassandra Pentaghast, Parent-Child Relationship, Protective Iron Bull, Revelations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-16
Updated: 2018-04-16
Packaged: 2019-04-23 18:08:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14338128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorroenDyrd/pseuds/NorroenDyrd
Summary: In a bizarre alternative dimension, young Trevelyan, a Chantry orphan turned Circle mage turned saviour of the world, has been stripped of her Herald powers by the Tevinter magister Gereon Alexius, just as his master ordered him. But instead of killing Trevelyan, Alexius has merely gotten the Anchor instead of her, and has been making quite a decent Inquisitor after the dust settled. Now the Inquisition is already well-established in Skyhold, Felix has arrived with Dorian and is well on the mend thanks to input from Merrill and the Hero of Ferelden, and Alexius has mostly moved on from his villainous past. In this setting, a tiny family drama takes place: Cassandra finally discovers that Trevelyan - still there as an agent of the Inquisition - is actually none other than the child she had with Regalyan d'Marcall after their brief encounter in the days of her youth. The Chantry Sisters that were there, especially one called Benevolence, all insisted that the baby girl had died; but now, that riddle-talking spirit boy, Cole, insists that 'Benevolence has turned to lies'.





	1. Chapter 1

Cassandra is never without a partner to keep her swordfighting skills honed. And no, she is not counting those flimsy training dummies that burst under her strikes by the dozen, the straw peeking out of their ruptured seams like Varric's chest hair (the dwarf finds it unnerving, and serves him right).  
  
Sometimes, she spars with Cullen; sometimes, with Ser Blackwall; Bull often needs hitting as well - with a thick, sturdy baton rather than a sword, though.  
  
As per some odd Qunari custom, it is usually not as much for melee practice as for distracting him from the things that occupy his mind. And those things know no measure. Bull is, after all, a giant grey mother hen for a band of misfits, which has recently been joined by none other than the hapless mage son of Eamon Guerrin (the boy was among the rebels in Redcliffe, and after seeing him have a hard time in battle, Bull took him under his proverbial wing).  
  
She crosses blades with Alistair, too - another addition to the ranks that they gained after Josephine's attempt to parlay with the rebels (a supposedly tame, boring secondary mission while the Inquisitor was busy recruiting the Templars) turned into disaster.  
  
The one-time Grey Warden has been drifting aimlessly after his return from exile, and being a part of the Inquisition has given him purpose again. Even Cassandra, who has mostly heard of his unfortunate fate from rumours, finds it quite gratifying to see him grow less despondent and pepper his speech with more and more clumsy puns - to say nothing of Leliana, who actually travelled with him before his... fall from grace.   
  
She often comes to watch the two of them train, a silent figure Cassandra always catches hovering in the corner of her eye - and her pale, unreadable face downright blossomed into an uncannily bright smile that one time when Cassandra toppled Alistair into a puddle left over in the corner of the sparring ring after a recent rain, and he looked up at her with a grin and said, 'So, Seeker... Would you say I am... wet behind the ears?'.  
  
And lastly... There is that yet another sparring partner whose company Cassandra somehow finds especially... meaningful. That apostate child who has been with the Inquisition almost from the very start. The brown-haired, sharp-faced girl with a burn scar left as a lingering reminder of the sweltering rage of the wounded Fade that burned across the Haven valley in the first few horrific hours after the Conclave was destroyed (was that description... too much? Was sweltering the right word?).  
  
The girl's name is Nadia. Nadia Trevelyan - though only a member of that Marcher clan by marriage (fleeting as it was hasty) rather than birth.   
  
From what Cassandra can gather, the Trevelyan family does not even deign to acknowledge her existence. Or that of her late husband. A youngest son, disowned the moment his magic manifested, not visited but once during his Circle days, nor sought out after he became an apostate and wandered Thedas with his young wife until ultimately meeting a rogue Templar's blade.  
  
An orphan raised haphazardly by the Chantry, one among many in a sea of half-starved, grey-faced, neglected children, even named 'nobody' to make it certain that she knew her place, Nadia is a living reminder of how the servants of the Maker have failed the less fortunate of His creations.  
  
That must be the reason why Cassandra finds herself so drawn to her, so eager to train her whenever she expresses a wish to master the weapons of a warrior as well as a mage.  
  
Guilt.   
  
And also... Pity.  
  
She is so very lonely, this child. So very tiny and lost amid the towering vastness of Skyhold.   
  
Bull keeps her company - in more ways than one, some people whisper - but she insists that she does not believe in love, supporting her claim with such loud and deliberate 'Ugh!' noises that Cassandra sometimes finds herself stiffening at the sound, wondering if the girl is mockingly mimicking her own self. She would have snapped at her for this, too, had she not been too preoccupied by feeling sorry for the child.  
  
It would be unworthy to pry, but deep in her heart, Cassandra is resolute that Nadia is only saying such things because she is afraid of falling in love again after her husband was taken from her so cruelly. That is... That is what books tend to say on the subject. Not that Cassandra spends a lot of time reading about... or thinking about... affairs of the human heart. Maker's breath, she is being nosy, isn't she? Mulling over the girl's private life, past and present, as if she were... her parent!  
  
But heavens know she needs one.  
  
And there she goes again. More nosiness... Still, Cassandra cannot shake off the feeling that Nadia's lonely little heart is reaching out for a guiding figure, like a flower reaching towards the sun (corny, yes; for shame!).   
  
Before they discovered Skyhold, Nadia was little short of joined at the hip with the Inquisitor - still Herald, back then. They did emerge from the Fade together, him bearing his Mark, her, the fresh scar... And the Inner Circle members do sometimes say that he is her uncle, to hide the disgrace of harbouring a former Tevinter cultist.  
  
Though... as of late... Cassandra has been finding him less and less of a disgrace. He - he was ready to give his life away to give them a chance to escape, when his former brethren burned Haven!   
  
And he would have; he would have perished in the mountains, had Cassandra not insisted on looking for him! Oh Maker, she still shudders when she thinks back to that moment when she pulled him out of a snowdrift, bluish-pale and icily cold, and a gaping black void opened up inside her when she cupped her hand round his waxen face...  
  
Ahem. Regardless of those... colourful memories. The fact of the matter is: the Inquisitor has now been reunited with his son, for whose sake he had joined the cult in the first place - and Nadia has clearly been distancing herself from the both of them. Hurrying away the moment they spot her in the Skyhold courtyard. Speaking in impatiently curt, one-word phrases if they do catch her, and then slinking away. Volunteering for different missions before the Inquisitor as much as opens his mouth to offer her to come with him to explore some new corner of Thedas where the Inquisition is establishing a presence.  
  
That is something that has not passed unnoticed.  
  
'She is shunning me,' Cassandra once heard the Inquisitor say, as she lay on her stomach on her bedroll, peeking out of her tent to catch a glimpse of him, settled by the fire on the bottom of some overgrown ravine in the Emerald Graves, the shadows of the overhanging roots casting a twisted dark net over his upturned face.  
  
She... She was not spying on him, Maker forbid - she had just been woken up by the sound of his voice, and wondered if something was amiss!  
  
He was addressing his apprentice, as Cassandra remembers. This young Tevinter was quite standoffish towards him at first, over some past falling-out, but now - after a fighting dozens of battles side by side - they confide into one another almost as candidly as they must have done back in the Imperium.  
  
'I thought I could make it right... And she did tell me that she did not care for... who I was... But... I suppose some things do not deserve forgiveness. I would never have earned yours if I had continued down the path... offered by the Venatori...'  
  
The younger Tevinter scoffed - and yet, as he spoke on, his tone soon turned to soft, melancholy wistfulness.  
  
'Wait, you can't be that clueless, can you? This is not about your magical blunder of the century! The poor thing is just jealous of you and Felix! Father and son fawning so much over each other... Him, rushing blindly into all manner of danger, from Venatori plots to inns with dreadful room service, because you had accidentally whisked yourself from Tevinter to the south, into the middle of a magical explosion, and he needed to know if you were all right... Then you, burying yourself in books again when you are not closing rifts, and pestering your Spymaster's Warden friend with all these letters about a Blight cure, and ooohing and aaahing over the research of that adorable little elven wife Hawke has brought with him... That kind of devotion is something that can wound the heart of an orphan. Or... Or someone with a family so distant that they might as well be an orphan. It is that very particular kind of pain, see - looking on at someone that basks in all the warmth while you are freezing outside of their cozy little world... longing for the sort of happiness they have... and knowing that it was not meant for you...'  
  
He trailed off - and before Cassandra ducked sheepishly back into her tent, reasoning that she had seen enough, she thought she saw the Inquisitor wrap one arm around him.  
  
'Dorian, you foolish boy,' he said, mirroring his apprentice's intonation shift from friendly mockery to sadness. 'Your hypothesis could not have been more wrong. You absolutely do deserve happiness'.  
  
And Nadia deserves happiness as well. And if no-one else can be bothered to provide it to her - well, Cassandra shall do what little she can to make her feel less alone in the world. Even if it is something as simple as a sparring session.  
  
Except... Except their latest session is going to be far from simple. Because this time, the boy in the hat has shown up to watch.


	2. Chapter 2

Cassandra finds this Cole character - whoever... whatever... he is - to be somewhat... unnerving.  
  
The way he speaks, his riddles more inscrutable the more he tries to explain them.  
  
The way he fishes through people's mind for their innermost thoughts, his blue eyes both glassily vacant and all-seeing.  
  
The way he appears out of thin air, and then disappears again... Which he must be doing far more often than any of them is aware of, what with his ability to make people forget him; who is to say that this faint headache she feels sometimes, before looking down and seeing that one of her... personal tomes has been leafed through, is not a sign that he has been there?  
  
But on the other hand, this uninvited guest from the Fade has been... not quite useless to have around sometimes, both because of his mystical ability to sense pain and anguish, and because of his rather chilling mastery of shadowy dagger strikes.  
  
And, according to the Inquisitor, he never would have defeated the demonic double of Lord Seeker Lucius if Cole had not appeared in the visions that the creature was forcing him to live through - waking nightmares of a broken, flame-engulfed world where he still served his former master. Where he rallied a demon army that made the rivers of Orlais and Ferelden run red with blood, under a venom-green sky, fully devoured by the Breach; and where he imprisoned and tortured his former comrades till nothing remained of them but a crimson splatter on the floor of a dungeon, where corrupted lyrium crystals grew out of the walls, and the air rippled like that very same tainted river water.  
  
Cole guided the Inquisitor through that red-and-green wasteland - and he guides him still. Cassandra knows that because she has often found the boy crouching on the Inquisitor's desk when visiting his quarters late at night. No, no, no - that sounded atrociously improper! It probably is atrociously improper, too! True, her sole intention has always been to make sure that the Inquisitor gets some rest in between doing his official duties and perfecting all those counter-Blight potions; and she has had to guide him to bed, half-coherent and stumbling over his own feet, more times than she can count... But is that not how some bed-sharing scenes in novels start?! Person A is exhausted, Person B is sympathetic; they lay down together, and... dare she say it... cuddle?!   
  
She should probably stop doing that. The Inquisitor is not a child; he will only have himself to blame if he dozes off while passing judgement because he stayed up too late scribbling formulas the night before.  
  
Ahem. That was not the point. Cole was the point.  
  
All things considered, perhaps the meddling spirit deserves the Inquisition's trust, after all.  
  
This train of thought troubles Cassandra sometimes - she used the same reasoning to tolerate a supposedly repentant cultist in the Inquisition's midst; she must be going soft! - but she really is less wary of Cole than on the day he first moulded himself out of the dusty beam of light streaming onto the war table.  
  
He enters their training ring in his usual manner: one moment, there is no-one there but the two of them, Cassandra striking, Nadia parrying - and the next, the training dummy in the corner seems to acquire a gigantic, scarecrow-like hat, which, upon a closer look, turns out to be hovering in front of its droopy head rather than placed on top of it. Moments later, the rest of Cole is traced into being underneath the hat's floppy rim, and Cassandra finds herself, yet again, scrutinized by those inhuman blue eyes.  
  
He always seems especially curious to watch them together, side by side: shifting his gaze from one to the other, whispering to himself, pulling thoughtfully at his straw-like hair... The others do it too, albeit in a less obvious manner; it is annoying, but not too hard to explain. Cassandra and Nadia are, after all, similar in some ways, both in appearance and temper.  
  
They have the same sharp facial features; the same preference for swords and shields (the battle gear, that is! the battle gear!); the same irresistible impulses to punch or kick anything punchable and kickable in the vicinity when they are feeling frustrated. In a different world, they could have been related; and there are moments when Cassandra almost convinces herself that they actually are, in this one. The Pentaghast family tree is tremendous as it is convoluted; and nothing could have technically stopped some distant cousin of hers, whom she may have never even met, from siring an illegitimate daughter and giving her up. Cassandra would have had to do the same, if the... the pregnancy that had resulted from her imprudent youthful encounter with Gal... Regalyan d'Marcall had not ended with the child dying.  
  
Cole must have seen into her head right now, and discovered how her thoughts have trailed off - or, on the other hand, he could also have rifled through the conscious of Nadia, poking at the wounds left by always being alone; by having no family.  
  
One thing is certain: when he opens his mouth, the soft, rhythmic chant that he startles both Nadia and Cassandra with sounds very much like... The description of childbirth.  
  
'Pressing, pushing, persisting... Flowing forth from the bleeding, warm darkness, into the hard, cold light... Swimming, screaming, gasping, grasping, wanting for Mother to hear. Hear, hear... Here. I am here. I can breathe now. I can see the light, the colour; it is bright and blurred and bloated and doesn't make much sense. Mother could help me make sense - but she can't. She is not allowed to'.  
  
Somewhere miles upon countless miles away, in another remote plane of reality, a training blade falls silently onto the ground, having slipped out of a hand that might be Cassandra's. She is not certain if it is - and she does not care. It seems that she was too hasty to trust the boy, after all.  
  
Her throat hot and tight, her nostrils quivering, her feet barely touching the soil, Cassandra rushes forward with the force of a tempest, and closes her grip round the front of the spirit boy's patchwork jacket.  
  
'Why are you saying this, Cole?' she asks, her voice soaring to a hoarse pitch. 'Whose memories are these? Nadia's? Or mine? Why are you bringing this up?!'  
  
Cole blinks, and, after giving him a few shakes for good measure, Cassandra lets him go, still huffing to herself. When she steps back and gives him space, he moves his hands in front of himself, as if trying to grasp at something.  
  
'It hurts when I give shape to your hurt,' he intones in the same singsong manner, moving his pale gaze from Cassandra to Nadia, who has also dropped her weapon and is slowly biting off sliver after sliver of skin from her lower lip, while her fingers ball into fists.  
  
'But I don't know any other way to help. Your hearts scream so much when they are next to each other, because they still remember how it was twenty years ago. A big heart sustaining a small heart, teaching it how to turn into a human. Until the human is made, and the hearts can never beat together again'.  
  
Now, it is Nadia's turn to lose her temper.  
  
'Look, Cole,' she edges in front of Cassandra and cups her hands round her waist, studying the boy's sickly features with a squint.  
  
'I know you are doing your best, but this is a tad personal, all right? So how about you hop off and help someone else? It's not like you can do much for either of us anyways. My mom abandoned me; Cassandra's kid died. The more we sulk over it, the more it hurts... Like you said yourself'.  
  
Cole sighs sadly and hangs his head, almost making Cassandra regret yelling at him.  
  
'I try to catch the words you scream on the inside, but they dart off through my fingers, small and swift and slippery like baby fish. Human fingers are more solid, a better trap. Maybe a human can explain better... If you ask why benevolence has turned to lies'.  
  
The echo of that last word, 'lies', tossed into the air like a pebble in a pod, still lingers - but the training ring is, once more, empty save for a lifeless dummy and a pair of lonesome shaken women with discarded weapons at their feet.   
  
Cole is gone.  
  
'Andraste's ti... Teapot!' Nadia grouses, shaking her head and side-glancing at Cassandra before she corrects her blasphemy to something more innocent.   
  
'I appreciate what Cole is doing, but... This won't lead anyone anywhere. Benevolence to lies? What does this even mean? A metaphor of some sort?'  
  
'Perhaps not just a metaphor,' Cassandra muses, jolting up her head as a sudden memory slaps her on the back of her skull.  
  
'Benevolence... I think that was the name of the Chantry Sister that was there when I was... in labour'.


	3. Chapter 3

Benevolence has turned to lies. Cassandra is far from fluent in Cole-speak (no-one is, really, save for Solas) - but her gut tells her that the spirit boy had to have been hinting that Sister Benevolence told her some sort of lie. What if the child has actually lived, and she has been kept in the dark this whole time?  What if she can still meet them? But... But should she? Is it not too late? Is it not better to leave things the way the are? Is it not better to track Cole down again and command him to make her... forget? Nadia is right: ceaselessly dwelling on the past is pointless as it is excruciating. But... But damn it all, how she hates being lied to!  
  
In the end, it was this burning, wounding knowledge that an entire chapter of her story had been torn out without her even being aware of it, this livid rage over getting deceived, that pushed her to keep pursuing Cole's lead. Like some powerful maleficar's compulsion, it led her away from the training ring, with naught but a curt 'I'll be quick' to Nadia, who was still unimpressed by Cole's revelation (or trying to be). It guided her up a series of staircases, each steeper and narrower than the next, right into Leliana's rookery. It pulled, puppeteer-like, at her jaw, shaping a hesitant question,  
  
'Leliana... If you are able to spare the resources... Could you perhaps... Investigate a Chantry sister by the name of Benevolence?'  
  
And it also took control of her when she realized that the Inquisitor was there as well. He must have come up the tower to sent his regular correspondence to the Hero of Ferelden - maybe even an envelope with that sending crystal Dagna has been tinkering with, to help Skyhold's resident Blight researchers  actually talk to the wandering elf, across all this distance. And the moment Cassandra saw him, in the middle of backtracking under the displeased glare of Baron Plucky, the same burning sensation, deep within her aching, cracking ribcage, drove her into stepping in front of him, and wringing her hands, gauntlets pulled off for better gesturing, and spilling out everything Cole had dredged up from her heart of hearts. Her yearning to be a parental figure to Nadia, her tangled-up feelings towards the spirit boy, her suspicions that that torturous day twenty years ago may have gone differently than she was told...  
  
And he listened, patiently, with not a word of interruption, his eyes clear and wide in their net of fine lines - and when her little rant ran its course, he caught her hand and squeezed it, still without speaking.  
  
Cassandra finds it rather... on the... on the pleasant side... when his fingers touch hers. This fleeting rush of shared warmth has always ignited a sort of... pure bright spark in her chest - ever since that moment when she first placed her bare palm on top of his icy cold knuckles, smiling at his furrowed, sleeping face in the slithering bluish murk of the dungeon.  
  
That was back when they still kept him in a cell below the Haven Chantry, even after he had stabilized the Breach and helped the Inquisition forces subdue one of the biggest, most ferocious pride demons Cassandra had ever raised a blade against. A captured cultist only kept alive for the sake of his Mark, he had still gone out of his way to protect Cassandra, standing between her and the roaring Fade-spawn and getting heavily scarred by its crushing claws.   
  
Moved by his selfless bravery - much more than she could ever have expected from herself - Cassandra would often visit the future Inquisitor as he carved himself a long, arduous, feverish path to recovery. And sneaking that gentle touch while his overseer Leliana was not looking... It had felt strangely invigorating, like someone had smashed through a wall in the dungeon all of a sudden and let through a gust of refreshingly crisp mountain wind, which washed generously over Cassandra and left that crystal-clear spark in its wake. And each subsequent touch they have shared has felt the same.  
  
Ugh. She has waxed needlessly poetic again. The point is, the Inquisitor supported her, and rallied his advisors in the war room, urging them to comb Thedas for Sister Benevolence.  
  
'She possesses certain... vital information,' he explained, as he leaned forward, spreading out his fingers with their tips planted firmly into the rim of the map. Then, he gave a long, meaningful look over his shoulder, to both Cassandra and Leliana.  
  
'I trust that each of you will do whatever it takes to locate her'.  
  
In the end, it was Josephine who had worked her diplomatic magic and, during the next war room meeting, triumphantly flourished a calligraphically outlined report, which said that a Chantry cleric matching Sister Benevolence's (or rather, Mother Benevolences) name and description had recently been seen in the Exalted Plains, ministering to the soldiers of Empress Celene's army.  
  
And, upon hearing this, the Inquisition agents have set off into the heart of the war-torn, debris-strewn flatlands that stew in acrid smoke under the distasteful gaze of the crumbling elven statues.   
  
As usual, they have formed a team of four. First, Cassandra herself, fuming more and more the closer they get to their goal. Then, the Inquisitor - who still has not said anything but was seen poring over the sketchy, half-faded portrait of his son as an infant (which he keeps among his research papers) just before they headed out. Nadia is there too - because, as she explained to Cassandra, shuffling on one spot on the armoury's threshold, 'I have this blasted nagging feeling that what Cole said concerns me too somehow, and it's driving me up the wall!'. And finally, they have Bull - to give Nadia moral support, which he, for all his nonchalantly lewd comments and daydreaming about carving monsters into shreds, is not at all bad at. Just a single tap of his huge three-fingered hand on her shoulder, and Nadia appears to start breathing easier. Could it be that his touch brings out the same spark?..  
  
Following the smudged, not too accurate map of the Orlesian encampments, they trudge through the withered yellow grass and squeeze in between massive cliffs and wade across the nauseatingly brown little rivers, which still carry the rot of the shambling corpses that the chevaliers would try to dump here. They fell the stragglers of the walking dead horde: a surge of paralyzing chain lightning from the Inquisitor, a shattering, whirlwind-fast shield bash from Cassandra, a limb-severing axe cleave from Bull, and a finishing fire ball from Nadia to pulverize the twitching armless and headless carcasses into ash - and they maneuver through the mazes formed by the sharp fences Celene's men have fortified their camps with. And at the culmination of this eventful journey, they finally stand face to face with a tall, prim woman with sucked-in cheeks and half-lidded eyes that make her look like she profoundly disapproves of the flushed, fuzzy-faced Orlesian recruit at whose bedside she is sitting. Because, evidently, he is too consumed by the pain in his own half-chewed leg (the tragic result of an encounter with one of those Fade-touched feral wolf packs, by the looks of it) to follow the Mother's cues and recite a prayer with her.  
  
'You are an undutiful child,' she says after he squeaks out yet another 'Praised be Andraste' and whimpers into silence.   
  
There is the same icy undercurrent in her voice that made a young, exhausted Cassandra feel like all warmth was being drained from her body when the then Sister Benevolence manifested from nowhere next to her cot and announced that 'The babe was stillborn. All the better for you, young Seeker. The Maker and the Chantry have other plans for you'.  
  
The recruit moans through his teeth - and the Mother goes on,  
  
'No wonder the Maker is sending you so much pain'.  
  
This makes Bull lose his patience.  
  
'The kid is in pain because you are making him repeat shit after you instead of healing him!' he barks, tipping his head like his namesake before a charge. 'Fuck, if Stitches were here, he'd smack you on the head! You know how to heal though, right, boss?'  
  
The Inquisitor purses his lips: as a former Magister, he feels that it sends a wrong message when people address him as 'boss', 'milord', or 'your worship'. He swallows his instinctive revulsion, however, and responds to Bull with a simple nod, flexing his fingers while a tender sprout of greenish-blue restorative light curls in his palm.  
  
Mother Benevolence slides her eyes from one interloper to the other, her lids crawling up a fraction of an inch.  
  
'And who might you be?' she asks sharply.  
  
'Take a guess,' Cassandra snaps back, emerging from behind Bull's back, while Nadia baits her breath in expectation.  
  
Mother Benevolence nods, snorting faintly.  
  
'Seeker Pentaghast,' she greets her dryly. 'I have been hearing much about you. You have matured into a true warrior of faith... Barring your recent escapade'.  
  
'I am not here for debates around the Inquisition,' Cassandra cuts her short, breathing in and out rhythmically and reminding herself over and over that she should not give in to the temptation to punch that snooty face... Just yet.  
  
'I am here because you lied to me'.  
  
Mother Benevolence gives her a one-shouldered, scoffing shrug - which makes the temptation flare up like never before.  
  
'I did what had to be done. As you yourself have always been taught to. The girl was bound for an orphanage either way, what with her... parentage. Thinking she was dead has spared you the distraction of ever thinking about reuniting with her. This conversation we are having is also a distraction. Shouldn't you and your riffraff friends be slaying demons? Working to end...'  
  
She gestures broadly about her.  
  
'...This senseless bloodshed?'  
  
Just like when Cole read into her past, Cassandra feels as though a pair of red-hot vice is screwing itself tighter and tighter around her windpipe.   
  
The part of her that has given all these years to serving her faith, her Divine, her people, gladly and unconditionally, concedes that the Mother is right. But there is also the other part.   
  
The part that still aches at the memories of the doors of Uncle Vestalus' crypt-like home creaking open on the day of her parents' execution, and at the memories of Anthony, bathed in his own blood and refusing to open his eyes no matter how much force her tiny but stubborn self put into shaking him awake, and at the memories of all those lumpy black and red husks in the Temple's crater, and at the thought of Galyan being there somewhere, his face burned off, his beautiful eyes melted into charred sunken circles, gone forever without her even getting a chance to talk to him again after all these years.  
  
And that part knows that any minute, any second now, the punch she has been envisioning will become a reality. Except the Inquisitor and Nadia beat her to it.  
  
The former, with his lower lip twitching and his magic flaring from soft turquoise to angry crimson, almost presses his face into that of Mother Benevolence - who has floated up from her place beside the wounded recruit, carried by a powerful telekinetic impulse.  
  
'Watching over someone you care about is never a distraction,' he spits - but the Mother still stands her ground (metaphorically of course).  
  
'You don't even know if the Seeker would have come to care about the girl...' she croaks, purple in the face.  
  
'That's because you never gave her the chance!' Nadia screams, her hands shaking and also alight with magic.   
  
'You tore a daughter away from her mother - the way you lot always do! And what about the girl, huh? What did you tell her? That her mother didn't want her?!'  
  
'Sister Pilar of Antiva saw to that,' Mother Benevolence says reluctantly, eyes on the Inquisitor's spell. 'I think she even gave the babe an appropriate name'.  
  
Nadia staggers - so that Bull has to wrap his arms around her to keep her steady on her feet, whereas the Inquisitor extinguishes his magic, overcome by concern (which makes Mother Benevolence land quite roughly back next to the recruit... but not roughly enough in Cassandra's book).  
  
'Oh, she sure did,' she hisses. 'Sister Pilar gave the girl a name that sounds like the Antivan word for nobody. Nobody. Nadie. Nadia'.  
  
She falls silent - and understanding rolls through their heads like a thunderclap.   
  
Bull's scarred face splits into a toothy grin - and, tightening his hug, he hoists Nadia up into the air.  
  
'HOOOLY SHIT, TREV!' he bellows, bouncing her up and down. 'What a family you got yourself! A badass Tama who's also your birth mom! Varric will crap his pants with the plot twist!'  
  
'I thought you Qunari frowned on the concept of families,' the Inquisitor says slyly, all his worries forgotten, laughter dancing in his gaze.  
  
'Not when Cass here is part of one!' Bull chuckles - and then turns his only eye on Cassandra.  
  
'Hey, just so you know, what I have with your kid is consensual all the way. I only give her what she needs, and never hurt her unless she asks. If you want the three of us to talk it out, I am all for it'.  
  
Cassandra does not know if she ever gives him any answer - but somehow, a few moments later, she finds herself drawn into the hug too, smooshed against Bull's chest with barely any room to breathe. While Nadia is right in front of her, sobbing and laughing and hiccupping a bit too. Cassandra looks at her, dazed, as if she has just met her for the very first time - and the features of her face that once seemed familiar by mere coincidence now all make sense, down to the tiniest line. She has her cheekbones and jaw, and Galyan's eyes and hair... And her nose... Her nose looks rather like Anthony's...  
  
'What am I going to do with you?' Cassandra whispers weakly, wriggling to move her arm and touch Nadia's cheek.   
  
Her throat and chest are free of the ache, and her heart swells rapidly with the flood of memories of how she and the girl fought evil together, every moment when she felt proud of her now coming back, intensified tenfold.  
  
'I have no clue how to be a mother...'  
  
'And yet, you have been one,' the Inquisitor tells her, his voice trembling slightly.  
  
Apparently, he, too, has joined in, one arm resting round Cassandra's shoulders, the other embracing Nadia, and features glowing with almost exactly the same overpowing happiness that almost gave him a heart attack when his son and apprentice arrived in Haven to warn them of the upcoming attack.  
  
'You have been one almost since the... the Inquisition's new beginning. I would know'.  
  
Somewhere beyond the warm, joyous, all-consuming embrace, the wounded recruit coughs in shock, and Mother Benevolence grouses something disgusted. They will have to be taken care of - later. Later. After Cassandra indulges - just the tiniest bit more! - in feeling her Inquisitor's touch and gazing into her daughter's eyes.


End file.
